Doug Drives the Roadster

[graham]

This picture stood out as one showing the camped cabin space with your legs turning in like like grass in the wind.

Yes, for folks who have not tried sitting in a Roadster this picture illustrates the interior trade offs pretty well. The "inside leg" gets to be mostly straight if you are not too tall for both the driver and passenger. The "outside leg" angles in somewhat. All that space shown to the right of the passenger's leg in the photo is the "door sill" everyone talks about, and it is ginormous. It is apparently lower than the original Elise by 2 inches, but it still seems 8 inches or so in width. You can see it in the picture starting to the right of the silver tray under the dash, and continuing all the way out to the door off the right of the photo.

The good news is that this increases elbow-shoulder room in the outside direction. If you lean slightly to the outside, there is a fair amount of arm/torso space over that doorsill between the seat and the door. This is good since there is no center console space to speak of between the seats, and traveling shoulder-to-shoulder with a passenger would be very cramped othewise.

However, leg room is not so lucky. There is a fair amount of length space under the dash to accommodate long legs, but the doorsill takes up much of the width making the foot area a bit cramped during long trips.

[DaveD]

Yay!!

Please continue to let us know your experiences with it as a daily commuter. There are many "first drive" write ups out there, but few experiences from people who drive it every day.

Will do, Graham. I'm not so much of a car guy that I feel my "first drive" impression would be any value over the others already written, but I'm serious about this being used as my primary four-wheeled vehicle (my electric Vectrix scooter now being relegated to being my 'other EV'). So, I'll try to post at regular intervals about my experience using it for everday purposes. As a fellow Seattle owner put it when I was riding around with him in my Roadster this weekend (paraphrasing), "I already know that it can go fast and that it looks great. What I want to know now is how does it feel to just use it in normal, everyday situations?"

[TEG]

Please include some of the funnier stories of questions you get and reactions heard from people that are astounded. No, please don't taunt gas station attendants like Lyle did, but please do include humorous anecdotes that come up when you surprise someone with the news that it is electric!

[DaveD]

Dang - and here I was making plans to visit all the gas stations in Seattle asking the attendants to "top me off".

I will do my best to report on people's reactions to it. I'm not one to seek out the attention of average people on the street (honest, I got yellow to improve my chances of being seen in traffic and not getting hit), but I'm sure that I'll inevitably get people approaching me with questions and amusing, and probably also antagonistic, reactions.

[James]

I can confirm that DaveD is always very visible to other vehicles, whether he is driving a yellow Roadster or riding his Vectrix electric scooter. He has a fluorescent yellow/green riding suit that is visible from about 2 miles away.

If he ever gets into an auto accident, the other guy will never be able to say, "I didn't see him."

[DaveD]

I got my first noticeable reaction to my Tesla today, from another motorist. I was stopped at a light, and a fellow pulled up beside me in a Mustang. I first noticed him when he had rolled his window down and was calling out to me, "WOW! A TESLA!!". He was pretty excited to see it, said he'd been following its development progress, was very interested in it, and that mine was the first he'd seen in the area. I asked him if he was going to order one, and he said he was thinking about getting one, but that they were "hard to get" what with the long lead time for ordering one. I told him that one had sold on EBay today for $160K. That made his eyes bug out. He asked me if the range was good, and I told him that I'd not yet pushed it. The light changed to green then, and we were on our separate ways.

Three days into the daily commute routine (normally, 25 miles RT), and I expect that the ingress/egress will forever be, shall we say, "interesting". I stopped by James' house last night to show it to him and give him a little time behind the wheel. He's a bigger guy than I am, and it's work for him, especially exiting.

I'm mostly behaving myself on speed/acceleration. Traffic density during commute hours doesn't lend itself to high-accel launches without risk, and I don't want to be a "jerk" in my driving. I did take a co-worker out for a short drive Tuesday, and on a long, straight side street with no traffic on it, did a rolling launch, which caused him to tense right up and audibly suck in his breath! I offered another co-worker a ride, and soon after he got into the passenger seat and closed the door, he was back out of it - turns out he's a wee bit claustrophobic, and the Roadster is "too uncomfortable" for him.

The high humidty here in Seattle when it's raining will cause the windows to fog up quickly. I'm training myself to be conscious of energy use in the Roadster, so when it starts to fog, I first turn on just the fan. That by itself will clear up the fog if the humidty isn't too high. Then I'll turn on the heat if it's still not clearing. That's all I've had to do so far. I've still got the use of the A/C in my arsenal as a way to dehumidify the cabin air, but that'll really suck the juice, so I've not resorted to it yet. Yes, given that I commute a pretty short distance, I could probably crank up the heater and the A/C all the time and not be in any danger of running the battery low, but since I'm not spending my driving time having to shift gears, I choose to occupy it by experimenting with minimizing energy consumption. To each his own, I suppose.

Approaching 300 miles on the odometer (includes that nice 2 hour drive with doug to the ocean in CA).